NAFTA

The project was initiated in April 2019 in collaboration with Architetti senza Frontiere Italia ONLUS as a photographic and video investigation into the phenomenon of caporalato—the illegal recruitment and exploitation of agricultural labour—and irregular migration between North Africa and the Sicilian coast, particularly the area between Gela and Pachino, facing Tunisia and Libya across the Mediterranean. The investigation focuses on territories shaped by the widespread development of greenhouse monocultures. In these areas, numerous Tunisian, Moroccan, Algerian and Libyan adolescents, as well as Romanian women, find immediate employment as agricultural labourers, becoming effectively trapped within the power structures governing irregular migration and the agricultural criminal networks operating in southern Italy.

Across the Mediterranean, meanwhile, protests and demonstrations against corruption within local governments frequently escalate into violent confrontations with the police. A parallel phenomenon has emerged on a mass scale, involving primarily boys between eleven and seventeen years of age, who smuggle nafta—fuel—from Libya towards the more heavily touristed areas of North Africa in order to finance their journey towards Europe. Pursued by the local police, they are at times tragically engulfed in flames by the highly flammable fuel they are transporting.

Developed between 2019 and 2020, the project brings together scenes from public life with fragments of everyday life shared with the people encountered during the investigation—experiences and relationships that rarely enter mainstream media narratives. Through photography and moving image, the project seeks to restore to art its role as a privileged witness to the reality in which we live.